Business networks, such as, most data center networks share switches between users and/or customers and/or departments, etc. As such, a single user, deliberately or unintentionally, can generate a large number of packets with random MAC (Media Access Control) addresses that fill the CAM (Content Addressable Memory) table in a switch and cause traffic to be flooded. Once the CAM table is full, the traffic is flooded out on all ports, causing network congestion on all segments connected to the switch.
This is known in the literature as a MAC Attack or CAM Table overflow. Once the CAM table is full, the switch is unable to learn any new MAC addresses. Similarly, if a large number of DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) requests are sent, an attacker can exhaust the address space available to the DHCP servers for a given period of time, thus, creating a simple resource starvation attack. As such, there is a need for a business and/or data center to provide a cost-effective way to develop ways to share switches between users and/or customers, while minimizing any external threats.